Not sure how many Bruno Mattei films (Or nom de plume Stefan Oblowsky in this case) I've seen or reviewed. He's directed at least 8000, so it's hard to keep track. But one thing occurs to me while watching The Other Hell; I've been internally mispronouncing his last name as 'Muh-tie', when it should actually be 'Muh-tay-ee'. Such musings are sidelined when a crazed nun cuts the still bloody vagina out of a long-dead corpse within the first five minutes of the movie. Gimme that ol' Muh-tay-ee magic!

Once upon a time, disingenuous video-merchants may have tried luring you into their musty shops representing The Other Hell as a Nun-sploitation movie. Don't be fooled! Although the movie takes place in a Convent and includes intestine fondling, no nuns were harmed in the making of this movie, neither were Catholics tricked into buying many tickets. In fact, the only...Read the entire review

Beyond The Darkness is directed by Joe D'Amato. That's the pseudonym of Aristide Massaccesi, the director whom, if I understood one of the supplemental features correctly, directed only one feature he felt proud enough of to put his real name on. For the schlock we like, that's a pretty high batting average. Yet D'Amato (no stranger to unwatchable trash) out-does himself with Beyond The Darkness, (AKA Buried Alive etc.) a movie that's really hard to like, but nonetheless compels cultish repeat-viewings.

The upshot is that hot sleazebag taxidermist Frank (Kieran Canter) freaks out when his bride-to-be Anna (Cinzia Monreale) dies, so he starts sucking his creepy housekeeper's breasts (Franca Stoppi as Iris in a searingly weird role) and prepping his bride's corpse for hanging over the mantelpiece, so to speak. The (living) pair also kills a few ...Read the entire review

The Devil's Rain (1975) is an unusual horror movie with a bit of a cult following, though even its fans generally don't quite grasp what it is driving the movie's strange appeal. The erratic tone is partly to blame: much of it is genuinely unnerving, even nightmarish, but it also goes overboard with Grand Guignol ghoulishness, especially during the climax. For reasons eluded to in the supplements, at one point during shooting director Robert Fuest (The Abominable Dr. Phibes) allowed several actors to camp it up. The producers weren't happy about this and ordered some of those scenes reshot, but one key scene remained with its campiness intact. Other scenes with critical exposition apparently weren't redone, resulting in a confusing climax.

Nonetheless, most of The Devil's Rain is very good indeed, similar to and nearly in the same class as both The Devil Rides Out (...Read the entire review

Director Richard Stanley is not likely a household name to the average filmgoer; while most recently he has come into the public eye again through "Lost Soul" the fascinating documentary chronicling Stanley's failed Hollywood breakthrough via a now legendarily bad adaptation of "The Island of Doctor Moreau," Stanley remains an independent auteur in every sense of the word. His early 90s cyberpunk near masterpiece "Hardware" likely remains his best work, while "Dust Devil" should be a film with more acclaim than it receives (likely the effect of massive tinkering by Miramax upon its stateside release). Stanley has another filmmaking side, one of a documentarian focused on the odd and obscure. Stanley's 2013 documentary "The Otherworld" arrives via a very noteworthy Blu-Ray release and offers viewers possibly the most calm Stanley offering in quite some time.

Cathy's Curse:Been having troubles writing this review for Cathy's Curse, a Canuxploitation potboiler of staggering import. Or not. Severin Films probably doesn't care where the movie ranks or what it is really, and maybe they shouldn't. Is it a harebrained take on Audrey Rose? The Exorcist? Or a five-and-dime take on The Omen? Is it full of artful shots and a malignant moppet? Or crappy performances and an After School Special budget? Can it be all these things and more? And why haven't you ordered it yet?

Ancient flashbacks reveal a poor girl, killed cruelly in a fiery car crash. Cut to 1980s Montreal (yeah you right baby) as a cute family moves into a lovely home, more or less haunted by the girl killed in the car crash. (If you think that's a spoiler, leave the room now, please.) Soon enough, dear Cathy (Randi Allen) gets the old curse when she finds ...Read the entire review

The MovieUnless you're a hardcore comics fan, there's a good chance you've never even heard of 2000AD, an anthology that's one of England's most beloved comic-book series, but you're quite possibly aware of its biggest star, Judge Dredd, the authoritarian, violence-dealing lawman best known stateside for the awful Sylvester Stallone film adaptation and the later, far-better Karl Urban take. But the British institution is way more than just the home of ...Read the entire review

Though cheap and poorly made, almost amateurish, Black Frankenstein (1973) is not without interest. A horror movie-Blaxploitation hybrid, it was, apparently, a labor of love for criminal lawer Frank R. Saletri, who wrote and produced it for just $80,000. Saletri was by all accounts a die-hard "monster kid," a fan of classic movie monsters of the 30s and 40s, and very active in such organizations as the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror films and the Count Dracula Society, hanging out with such super-fans as Dr. Donald Reed and Forrest J. Ackerman. He had a dog named Bela Lugosi while other sources suggest he lived in one of Lugosi's old mansions. According to news reports he also had a reputation for squeezing his clients in the middle of their criminal trials, a rogues gallery of pimps, prostitutes, and gangsters. It's not surprising then that, ten years later, Saletri was found ...Read the entire review

Pre-dating both Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), Drive In Massacre (1977) is a low budget but pretty-good-for-its-type early slasher film. All things considered, actors John F. Goff and George Buck Flower's screenplay breathes life into its surprisingly dimensional characters, which aren't the usual generic mob of horny teenagers, and the acting is unexpectedly good for such a cheap film.

Seen today, the picture also offers viewers the opportunity to soak in the slightly seedy ambiance of a real (recently closed when the film was made) drive-in theater, that form of movie exhibition on the downslide by the 1970s. For this critic it brought back a lot of memories.

Some have described this as an exploitation variation of Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968); both feature a drive-in theater where many are killed, but that's where the similarities end. With clini...Read the entire review

The MovieSeverin brought us Kung-Fu Trailers of Fury a year ago, a collection of previews for martial-arts films of various renown. Apparently it did well enough--and Severin found enough interesting trailers--to make a sequel, the appropriately-titled Return of Kung-Fu Trailers of Fury, which provides a peek at 35 more old-school kung-fu movies, most of which you've never heard of, but which have a certain something that makes them worth watching for a moment or two.

The Survivor:Actor David Hemmings directs the slow-burn shocker The Survivor, (1981) based on James Herbert's best-selling novel, which enjoys a tasty new Blu-ray release from Severin Films. And now you, the one who maybe saw this title sitting lost and alone on your video merchant's shelf, but refused to rent it, can enjoy it too.

A supernatural mystery, The Survivor is long on style, fine performances, and atmosphere. However, it starts out with a bang, as 747 pilot Keller (Robert Powell) is forced to crash-land in a Sydney suburb in a keyed-up, almost excruciating scene made all the more powerful due to its scale and incredibly realistic staging. Unfortunately, Keller is the only one to survive, setting off a semi-existential quest to figure out why.

Not only is Keller haunted by visions of horribly burned corpses, he's also stalked by an ambulance-chasing photographer,...Read the entire review

You know what they say about animals behaving strangely in the hours leading up to an earthquake, right? Now take a zooful of these beasts, serve them up water tainted by PCP, and shudder at what horrors await when the g...Read the entire review
]]> The Killing Of America (Blu-ray)Blu-rayhttp://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=71573
Wed, 30 Nov 2016 19:24:56 PSTRecommended

The Killing Of America:The Killing Of America saw a two-week theatrical run in New York, in 1982, before drifting into the realms of the unseen. A longer, more graphic version enjoyed popularity in Japan, but for the rest of us, there were no VHS releases, nothing, until now, thanks to Severin Films, which is releasing this definitive Blu-ray edition. For scholars and lovers of Mondo Movies, this is a holy grail, and now that it's available for all to see, we can finally find out if the movie's release is worth the quest.

The Killing Of America represents something of a highbrow 'reality death' movie, graphic and unrelenting, but with aspirations to resemble a Public Broadcasting examination of violence in America. In practice, the movie is a bit like a hard version of one of those When Animals Attack FOX TV specials from the late 1990s. As though building a wall of ou...Read the entire review

Okay, so now a gaggle of zombies are shambling around some ancient, decaying tombs. Abruptly cut to a romantic picnic in the garden! Moving on, now a photographer is snapping shots of his lover frolicking by a fountain. A butler and maid look on in horror as the hideous lights in a chandelier flicker on and off before exploding. She screams hysterically! More exploding lights. Just when you think they've ran out of bulbs, there's a third, identical chandelier to go pop-pop-pop-pop-boom! So, back to zombies caked in paper mach&#233; and live maggots as they slowly lurch onward.

Doctor Butcher M.D.:The lunatics at Severin Films specialize in digging up the shabbiest, most infamous, woefully wonderful exploitation movies ever. The one-hit wonders, the also-rans, the genre equivalent of the kids who get picked last for dodge ball. These films ride the ragged edge of disrespectability; they're proud of it, and we love Severin Films for giving them an almost deserved pat on the back. Doctor Butcher M.D. epitomizes the Severin aesthetic. This 1980 coattail rider is so daft, gore-drenched and incomprehensible, it has to be seen to be believed.

With all due respect, Doctor Butcher M.D. is the horror movie equivalent of the 80-year-old, mentally ill, chronically homeless person wandering downtown's deserted streets at 4am, raving about several different things at once. In New York, someone sneaks into a hospital morgue to slowly saw the hand off of a corpse....Read the entire review

Although their pop culture impact does not seem to have endured beyond the early 1980s, there were once a series of books about Christina Van Belle, "The Playgirl of the Western World." Christina is a sexually liberated heiress, famous all over the globe and notoriously uninhibited. Published by Playboy, the series managed to rack up 19 entries between 1976 and 1983, all published under the pseudonym "Blakely St. James", and featuring photographs of Jill De Vries as the title character. Curiously, it was only after the last book in the series had been published that legendary writer/producer Harry Alan Towers (a frequent Jess Franco collaborator) adapted the character in what the opening titles of Christina optimistically promise will be the first of several movies (in truth, this is the only movie in the would-be series).

The MovieNot unlike most American film buffs, my knowledge of Australian cinema has always been sparse, limited mainly to the big titles, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Walkabout, Mad Max and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (and the occasional outlier, such as Romper Stomper or The Castle/. However, after watching the amazing documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which explored the wor...Read the entire review

I really like trailers. They're like mini bite-sized movies that youcan watch in a few minutes, and often times they're better than thefull-length feature itself. The problem with trailer compilations isthat they often feature old, low quality print and there is a lot ofrepetition between various publishers. There are some notableexceptions, Synapse's 42nd St Forever discs are great, but Iapproach new trailer collections with caution. When Severinannounced that they were releasing a set of Kung Fu trailers, I didget excited. I've like the other discs I'd seen from the company,and they were taking the trouble to release it on Blu-ray (alongwith a DVD version) which is a good sign.

The Sinful Dwarf:You want to get touched deeply, sonny? Move along. BUT, if you want to feel the need to scrub your eyeballs with a brillo pad, then Severin's got a deal for you, in the form of this bottom-of-the-barrel sleaze show you've read about, you've heard about, and you prayed couldn't possibly be real. Yep, it's The Sinful Dwarf; fundamentally horrific, aesthetically repellent, psychologically innocuous and figuratively the patent holder to the OTHER little blue pill, Argaiv, or the cure for the common erection. Somewhere down the line, some drunken fool was taking the piss, wondering whom he could bamboozle with this awful idea. Experience it now, but don't expect to respect yourself in the morning.

Lila Lash, (Clara Keller) a scarred, drunken scumbag, has had a hard life. Her sad coping mechanism involves using her creepy dwarf son Olaf (a nightmarish Torben Bille) to lu...Read the entire review

Thirty-odd years ago I rented a VHS copy of what I had wrongly assumed was a Hammer film, Jes s "Jess" Franco's Count Dracula (1970). While it starred actor Christopher Lee, of Hammer's Horror of Dracula (1958) and its many sequels, in this Lee sports a walrus mustache and gray hair. Respected European actors Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski appear in supporting roles, and yet the film has none of the polish of Hammer's modest productions. Indeed, it's quite clunky, cheap, and ponderous.

But Lee's participation, its comparative fidelity to Bram Stoker's original novel, and the growing if unfathomable cult surrounding director Franco has kept Count Dracula (El Conde Dr cula) a desired title by some genre fans. Presumably convoluted rights issues to this Spanish-West German-Italian-Liechtensteinian (!) co-production precluded a U.S. Blu-ray edition until now, but Severin Films h...Read the entire review

Inspired by Orson Welles before him, Frederick R. Friedel was hellbent on having written and directed a feature film before he'd turned 25.

That would be a high bar to clear even for someone with a lifelong passion for filmmaking. Friedel wasn't one of those kids hammering out backyard epics on a Bell and Howell 8mm camera, though. He'd never stepped foot on a film set. Hell, as he was lining up financing for the movie that he'd title Lisa, Lisa, he hadn't even gotten around to writing a script. Sure, Axe -- as Friedel's debut as a filmmaker would be best known -- is a long, long way from Citizen Kane. Where inexperience and ill-temperment torpedoed other amateur genre filmmakers whose grasp couldn't hope to match their reach, Friedel crafted something unique and memorable in all the right ways....Read the entire review

Turkey Shoot:I'll probably catch hell for this, but Turkey Shoot (aka Escape 2000) is far more turkey' than anything else. An also-ran from the Ozploitation' camp, 1981's Turkey Shoot flies under the radar for all but the most hardened of international exploitation fans, and there are plenty of good reasons why it's not better-known: leaden pacing, inexplicable character choices, episodic through-put, and not enough gore, for the most part, make this an underwhelming choice for devotees of the wet stuff. Severin Films knocks it out of the park with this Blu-ray release, packed with nice extras, but is reaching to tout this as an offensive exploitation classic. Read on, if you don't already hate me too much.

Set in the dystopian late-1990s, Turkey Shoot opens with brutal real-life riot footage, leading us to believe there's a reason a bunch of yellow-jump-suit-...Read the entire review

Severin Films has put together a wonderful package of high-def material starring Barbara Steele (b. 1937), the "Queen of Horror." Nightmare Castle is really three films for the price of one - not to mention the scads of supplementary features. For Euro-horror film fans, this is a major release.

In addition to Mario Caiano's Nightmare Castle (Amanti d'oltretomba, 1965), remastered and restored from the original camera negative, the single Blu-ray disc also includes Antonio Margheriti (aka "Anthony Dawson") and Sergio Corbucci's Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra, 1964) and Domenico Massimo Pupillo's Terror-Creatures from the Grave (5 tombe per un medium, 1965), unrestored but sourced from sharp 35mm elements.

Watching them back-to-back, I found them about equally good. None can touch the pictorial beauty of the horror films of compatriot Mario Bava, who...Read the entire review

Devil Hunter / Cannibal Terror:Despite second billing on the box,Cannibal Terror gets pole position on the disk. Does it deserve it? Who should win in a battle between Idi Amin and Pol Pot, I ask you. Cannibal Terror is low, like late-era Bruno Mattei low, as far as cannibal movies go. Turgid pacing, woeful acting, a mere two scenes of cannibal mayhem, and the absolute worst tribe of cannibals ever put to film mark this as a gut-munching movie only a blind, mentally incompetent mother could love. Yes, it's that good.

Starring 'le petite Annabelle' as Florence, the little girl who gets things rolling, Cannibal Terror opens with breezy scenes of petite French thugs botching a break-in. Sadly, while boozing it up with their '80s glam moll, they hatch a scheme to kidnap a wealthy businessman's daughter, eventually holding her hostage with a buddy who lives happily ...Read the entire review

The MovieIf you've never listened to How Did This Get Made?, the movie podcast hosted by Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael, focusing on insane movies, you owe it to yourself to download a few and see what you've been missing. (My suggestion is to start with their episode on the little-seen Canadian film Gooby, where they are joined by Nathan Fielder [Nathan For You.]...Read the entire review

As one of the world's most prolific directors, Jess Franco gets a lot of mixed reactions from movie buffs, particularly those of us fascinated by European cult films. Franco has made all sorts of different films on all sorts of different budgets and in all sorts of different genres but widely considered some of his best are the few films he made with the smolderingly sexy Soledad Miranda. In a sense, she acted as his muse, and more so than any other woman (save for Lina Romay) she is most often associated with his work.

In She Killed In Ecstasy, Dr. Johnson (played by Fred Williams who also worked with Franco on El Conde Dracula and other pictures) has a happy life that he shares with his jaw droppingly gorgeous wife, played by Miranda (of Vampyros Lesbos and Eugenie DeSade fame). When Johnson's experiments bring him under the scrutiny of the...Read the entire review

My first introduction to the oddball cinema of Spanish filmmaker Jesus 'Jess' Franco came one night about 3am while channel surfing in my parent's basement. I'd just gotten back from college, it was time for the summer break, and I'd only minutes beforehand returned from an evening at the pub. I came across what appeared to be a pair of lesbian vampires doing their thing set to a be-bopping score and some whacked out colors and it instantly caught my attention. I didn't really know what I was watching and didn't find out until the film was finished that it was one of Franco's most popular films, Vampyros Lesbos. That semi-intoxicated late night initiation led me to seek out more of the man's work, and since that night over ten years ago I've become a fan of his wildly uneven catalogue of work. His films may not always be good in the traditional sense of the word, but t...Read the entire review

"So, the thing was I like vampires, [and] I like lesbian relations between two women...I think it's much more beautiful, the intercourse between two lesbian girls. So, we started like that. It was not important."- writer/director Jess Franco on Vampyros Lesbos

From 1984 to 1998, the British Board of Film Classification -- the last word of which was quietly changed from "Censors" -- upheld the Video Recordings Act in the United Kingdom, which monitored and reviewed content in motion pictures released on home video. A significant number of films were slapped with the "Video Nasty" label, which prevented them from being released, and hundreds of others were only released in edited versions. As a horror fan, I've always had a general awareness of films being cut in other markets, but the full scope of the censorship going on overseas was never that clear. People like to think of the censorship of art as a thing of the past, with Nazi book burnings being the closest comparison, but the footage of law enforcement officials tossing cassette tapes into a furnace by the handful seems awfully familiar, and it happened during the lifetimes of people who grew up on "Tee...Read the entire review

One of those "What were they thinking?" films from the early 1970s, The Baby (1973) is a real oddball horror-thriller similar but much inferior to Jack Hill's darkly comic cult film Spider Baby (filmed in 1964 but unreleased until 1968), so much so one wonders if Baby writer and co-producer Abe Polsky had seen it.

Produced on a modest but adequate budget, The Baby is pretty mild with little in the way of graphic violence (it was rated PG) but fairly depraved in terms of subject matter. The intent of the filmmakers' isn't entirely clear: there are vague hints Polsky and others involved with its production were attempting some sort of serious psychological thriller about child abuse stemming from psychologically unbalanced women but mostly it's just a pointless and despairing film prompted by the financial success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-type horro...Read the entire review

With north of 150 movies under his belt, spanning everything from spy thrillers to nunsploitation to lesbian vampires, how could Jess Franco not direct a slasher flick? Bloody Moon isn't subtle about it either. I mean, this 1981 slasher opens with a mute killer putting on a cheap, plastic mask -- complete with P.O.V. eyehole shots -- and savagely stabbing some nubile seductress. It corrects the many wrongs made in that opening sequence in Halloween, infusing in the right amount of disco, a less copyright-friendly mask, along with this guy:

There's just something about murderous little moppets. I don't know why, but whenever I stumble across a movie with kids savagely slaughtering the adults around them, I have to watch: The Children(both the 1980 and 2008 movies)The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, Beware! Children at Play, Children of the Corn, The Brood, Mutant, and the list goes on and on and on. Somehow I never got around to Bloody Birthday, a kinda-sorta slasher barely released in 1981 as Creeps(or was it Hide and Go Kill?) but largely shelved for another five years. After rescuing it from obscurity with their 2011 DVD release, Severin Films is giving Bloody Birthday an overdue high-def spit and polish on Blu-ray.

The MovieIf you're at all politically aware as an American, it's hard not to be incredibly frustrated by the politicians elected to represent the people in government. Once in a grand while they do something right, but most of the time they are just pandering or working for the lobbyists, when they aren't being straight-up corrupt. Now, I suppose it could be worse. We could have proud crack-smoking mayors like our neighbors to the north, or we could go back and experience what was goin...Read the entire review

Okay, Dead Kids is a head-on collision of an early '80s slasher with a retro mad scientist flick. You've got high schoolers signing up to become emotionless, murderous automotons in exchange for a crisp

Don't call them "vampires"; that's so bourgeois. There's nothing the least bit supernatural about them. Hell, they don't even have fangs, at least not until they put in those razor-sharp dental appliances when